1. Field
The present invention relates generally to weather information, and more specifically to obtaining weather information from road-going vehicles.
2. Background
Countless numbers of trucks ply the highways every day, both in North America and elsewhere around the world. At any given moment, there may be tens, hundreds, or even thousands of trucks on the road in any given geographic area.
Increasingly, trucks and other road-going vehicles include vehicle information systems that track and report vehicle position information. Such systems generally have wireless communication links with one or more monitoring facilities, such as a centralized Network Management Center (NMC). Satellite and/or terrestrial communication networks typically provide the communication links between the in-vehicle systems and the NMCs.
Position data provides fleet operators with real-time or near real-time monitoring of route progress, and greatly aids vehicle dispatching and management operations. Concomitant benefits include increased driver safety and vehicle/load security. As one example, QUALCOMM offers comprehensive fleet management services to fleet operators, and provides a relatively rich array of in-vehicle systems and related equipment, along with the software applications and NMC services needed to exploit the collection of positional data from potentially large fleets of road-going vehicles.
However, in-vehicle data collection and corresponding aggregate data processing has not heretofore exploited richer data collection opportunities, such as weather-related data collection and processing. There is therefore a need in the art for more fully exploiting the ability to collect and process information from road-going vehicles.